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Sex and Gender Stereotypes in Korean Advertising

Thanks to the students at Dongseo and Pusan National University for being such great audiences last week, and here is the presentation as promised. Sorry that the animations don’t work in the online version, but there weren’t too many.

For regular readers, unfortunately the slides may make little sense in themselves, but I’m happy to elaborate on any of them if you’re interested. The purpose of the first few, for instance, is not so much to illustrate the numerous subliminal sexual messages found in advertisements (although I certainly could spend an hour talking about those!), but more to make the point that nothing in an advertisement is accidental, and that it’s very naive to think otherwise. In turn, the picture of all the Korean churches is to provide a parallel to Normal Lewis’s point here, which is that if, say, my mother comes to Korea and notices all the neon crosses around, does that somehow make her a fundamentalist Christian? Or simply that there’s a lot of churches here? Likewise with noticing sexual themes in ads, no matter how perverted some people think that is.

Much better than me explaining here though, is for me to give a presentation at your own university or institution instead. Just give me a buzz — I’m pretty cheap!